I typically don’t blog on Sunday’s but this is an exception. Privacy is an important subject, especially when information is created about us everyday, sometimes without our consent. What happens when company’s learn so much about us that they call our every move? What happens when everything in the world is so public that there is no hiding? Well today I speak with Steven Baker, who is one of the beloved traditional journalists who loves social media. He wrote a piece in BusinessWeek after researching for it using Twitter (genius). His new book is called The Numerati and it takes a fascinating look at how mathematicians and other technical analysts are predicting our every move.
The Numerati is a very interesting book title and the cover is exceptional, relative to most books I read. Can you explain why your face is digitized and how that reflects the name of the book?
The idea is that the we produce loads of tiny details about our lives-–what we buy, what we click online, where we go with our cell phones. These bits of data travel on networks, and if someone were to piece them together, in a sort of mosaic, we would each pop into view. The only people who can do this, who can find us in the rivers of data we produce, are the mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists that I call the Numerati. Since the book is about how they piece us together, from our data, and predict our behavior as shoppers, workers, patients, potential terrorists, etc., it seems appropriate to me that the face on the cover would be made up of tiny numbers.
What happens to all the data we produce on a daily basis? Where does it go and does it help improve our lives, invade our privacy or both?
The data we produce on a daily basis makes its way through networks into giant data centers. The biggest ones, run by companies such as Google and Microsoft, are known as “clouds.” You might be interested to know that they keep multiple copies of lots of data, including your correspondence on G-mail. Having multiple copies spread around the world speeds up the service and insures against data loss when servers crash–as they often do.
If you look at it broadly, the analysis of our data gives them a detailed picture of each one of us, and it permits them to provide us with customized service. Sometimes this will be welcome. Customized medicine and health care could dramatically improve our lives. Targeted media and advertising would mean that we’d see things we’re more likely to find interesting and relevant. Supermarkets that analyze our data could offer us bargains on the foods we actually want to eat. But there is plenty of room for abuse. Some of the customized service will feel creepy. Sometimes they’ll get it wrong. And some companies could use it to extract higher prices from us, or to deny us services (like health insurance)
How are you using the ideas behind your book to find the appropriate audience that would actually purchase the book?
My publisher, Houghton Mifflin, has launched a behavioral targeting campaign. It’s very similar to one I describe in the book. Over the next six weeks, the behavioral advertising division of AOL, Platform-A, will analyze the Web-surfing patterns of the people who click on Numerati ads, and they will try to build profiles of the most promising group of shoppers–and then hit them with about 7 million ads. This is not a big campaign. And the idea is to use it to gather insights about the market. I’ll be blogging about the process on TheNumerati.net. I should add that the Web surfers that are followed in this campaign are entirely anonymous. None of us know their names, genders, or addresses. They’re simply patterns of Web surfing.
Your book talks about how people are collecting data about us and trying to manipulate our lives. Can this be stopped? Do we have any control?
We have control. We can pay with cash, stop carrying cell phones, erase cookies on our computers, etc. But I think that a smarter path is to understand the risks and benefits, and to take advantage of these services prudently. There are lots of benefits, as I mentioned above.
What are a few ways the Numerati are retrieving our information and using it?
They’re harvesting our data in the work place. And at some companies, including IBM, they’re using this information to deploy the workers more efficiently. (An excerpt of the book detailing what IBM is up to ran as a cover on BusinessWeek at the end of August.) They’re also trying to model and predict us as shoppers. This fall, political Numerati will be placing us into new behavioral “tribes,” based on consumer and demographic data, to target us as promising potential supporters for John McCain or Barack Obama. And researchers at the National Security Agency are sifting through our data trying to find the potential terrorists among us.
Are you a Numerati? What makes someone a Numerati?
No, I’m not one of the Numerati. I’d say to be a member of that elite group, you have to make your living by analyzing data, one way or another.
What are the positives and negatives for having Numerati in our world?
I’d say it’s mostly positive. I’d say many of the advances in science and medicine in the next century will come through the analysis of our data. It’s a lot more efficient, for example, to do medical research with computerized data than to fiddle around with test tubes. That means the Numerati will be front and center. One of the sources in my book, a young computer scientist named Jack Einhorn, got my attention when he predicted: “The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician, not a doctor.”
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Stephen L. Baker is the author of The Numerati and is a senior writer at BusinessWeek, covering technology. Previously he was a Paris correspondent. Baker joined BusinessWeek in March, 1987, as manager of the Mexico City bureau, where he was responsible for covering Mexico and Latin America. He was named Pittsburgh bureau manager in 1992.
Before BusinessWeek, Baker was a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post. Prior to that, he was chief economic reporter for The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela. Baker holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
